Make sure you right click on the picture itself and get that link, as opposed to the link for the website.

That could be it.

Well, they certainly are the simplest indicator.

There are two chief problems with giving managers credit or blame for performance against Pythagoras.

The first is that it is premised on the idea that the manager deserves no credit or blame for the raw run production and run prevention. I don’t think that’s true — in fact, I think the manager may have more to do with that (though still not much) than he does with the Pythagorean variance. Until just a couple of days ago, we could have said of the Indians: “Hey, they’re missing their second and third best pitchers and their second and third best position players — not to mention the bullpen is a mess — and yet they’re still scoring as many runs as they’re giving up.” Does the manager deserve no credit for that fact?

The second is that we know that there’s significant variance in Pythagorean records, and there may be five or six key factors at work in the variance — luck, front-end of bullpen, back-end of bullpen, extreme platoon splits within the lineup, etc. There is no real reason to think that a manager’s in-game decisions are a significant factor among those.

My unscientific sense of it is that there might be six or seven factors that account for 10% of the variance each, and then the other 30-40% is just pure noisy randomness. I think, basically, that this Pythagorean performance is very nearly worthless as a test of a manager.

I think you will find that managers more or less never get fired when a team has sustained the key injuries that this team has.

I am concerned that the significant injuries will cause management to underestimate the severity of significant performance problems we’ve seen this year, but there can be little doubt that two key factors — injuries + Betancourt — doomed this club, and I don’t see what the manager had to do with it.

I’ll even grant you that Wedge should have moved more decisively to convince players and the front office that Victor and Hafner needed to go on the DL sooner — that we’d have done better with Shoppach and, um, some other random terrible hitter in the lineup. But we don’t really know where Wedge was on that issue, and I don’t think anyone could claim that it would have made enough of a difference.

Not after this past week certainly.

But then again, if you use the team’s performance vs. the Pythag projection, the Indians over achieved in ‘07. Wasn’t Wedge managing then?

So what happened? Did Wedge suddenly go from genius to dolt over the off-season? Did the players decide to fold because they don’t like Wedge?

Myself I think that injurings and player delamination is what caused the current nightmare. We get an influx of talent and our injured players back and Wedge’ll be a genius once again.